22 Nov
2006
22 Nov
'06
12:55 p.m.
In article <00f601c70e74$8bfbaaf0$6700a8c0 at BILLING>,
"Jay West" <jwest at classiccmp.org> writes:
However, that being said... there is much more to the
historical archiving
of a document for posterity than slapping it on a scanner and putting it on
the web. Al does not simply do that. He has specific expertise in the
correct and best way to scan the documents (with regards to settings and
such), uses other utilities to process the images before converting to PDF,
in many cases hand adjusting them, etc. It is an art, not a "press a scanner
button" thing, and Al has it down cold.
While I agree with the sentiment that scanning old documents isn't
something that can be done nonchalantly, I disagree with the
implication that Al is the only one who has the Special Knowledge to
scan old documents into a form worthy of bitsavers.
Being someone who has worked in graphics, I'm probably more aware than
most of how to get the best results out of a particular original and a
particular scanner.
So long story short, emailing Al with a URL of the
scanned PDF is not the
best situation (although it's certainly appreciated). The best situation is
to get the original to Al so he can scan it himself and thus we all get
museum quality results.
The assumption here, as above, is that only Al has the Special
Knowledge of how to scan documents. Al has many things on his "to do"
list. Certainly its better for me to scan using the same settings and
techniques that Al would use and make the end result available to him
than to make him the bottleneck for all document scanning.
ISTR that we discussed document scanning on this list and Al told us
the kinds of things that he does when scanning. I don't recall
anything magical, either in equipment or techniques, that made Al's
scanning methods beyond what I could do myself. I do recall that some
of the things he mentioned might not be obvious to someone who hasn't
scanned documents that are ultimately intended for OCR at some point,
but then again not all of us are complete dunderheads when it comes to
document scanning either.
--
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